So, I thought I'd highlight the first new issues I picked up of some of my favorite fiction magazines from my salad days (having already blogged about the first older issues I encountered, my free first taste)...the second taste, no longer free (though only Ariel was so expensive as to make me think twice...).

The March, 1978, issue of F&SF (the first issue to cost $1.25...editor and publisher Edward Ferman would offer "all-star" issues for the anniversaries and every price rise...and clearly, my timing was exquisite) was pretty impressive, both for its nice proportion of horror stories (the Wellman, the Grant, the Garrett Lovecraftian parody which inspired the cover, and the relatively weak Young) and for the longest fiction in the issue, John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision." Solid columns by Algis Budrys, Baird Searles (his rundown of the film of Damnation Alley, quite probably the funniest column Searles wrote) and Isaac Asimov, a Gahan Wilson cartoon, Ted Thomas's deft humanistic sf piece, Glen Cook's fine Vancean fantasy, and a not-bad Papa Schimmelhorn story...instant addiction.

The quarterly Fantastic had its July issue out by March (and also the first $1.25 issue), so the next time I dropped by the Derry bookstore that was my source of new fiction magazines, and most of my new books, in my New Hampshire years (a real pity it didn't ever carry UnEarth nor Shayol nor even the Boston-based Galileo regularly in those years), I snagged it. Again, Robert Young's story was more foolish than not, but fun enough to read (and an opportunity for Stephen Fabian to do his mild cheesecake illustrations), but Charles Sheffield's first Erasmus Darwin historical fantasy (further stories would appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and F&SF in months to come, as Fantastic would soon go into its final decline) was impressive, as the horrors by Malzberg, Springer, and arguably Davis were augmented by charming fantasies by Godwin and Haldeman, and a borderline sf by Bunch. And Fritz Leiber was their book reviewer! I did luck into his first column in about a year or so...and one where he was, as he had with Katherine Kurtz previously, reluctantly forced to give a very negative review...unsurprisingly, even moreso (along with inviting a guest to give another persoective, at least as unimpressed).

There were only two more Ted White issues of Fantastic before Arthur Bernhard bought out his retiring senior partner Sol Cohen as publisher, and remade Fantastic into a garish mostly-reprint magazine with game but even more underpaid tyro editor Eleanor Mavor (she used the pseudonym "Omar Gohagen" at first). White wandered over to Heavy Metal for a year, where he luxuriated in a real budget...at about the same time, Ben Bova was leaving the sf magazine Analog and wandering over to a gig at Omni, and leaving behind a minimal budget for a similarly luxurious one.

The only conteporary series which could touch the Schiff anthologies, at least at first, was Charles Grant's Shadows volumes, with their emphasis on what Grant himself preferred to write, "quiet" or subtle horror...Avram Davidson's brilliant "Naples" led, and not only in its placement in this impressive debut.

(Well, to be fair, Ramsey Campbell found his 1980 New Terrors anthology published in two volumes...not supported, as Kirby McCauley was with his comparable Frights and Dark Forces, with one fat volume...these all comparable reads....)

Even Zebra, so ready to help overload horror fiction with mediocre to terrible horror novels in a few years, was willing to briefly support two anthology series, both not quite what they should be, and not quite up to these others, but more grist for my mill...Roy Torgeson's Other Worlds (which actually managed to leave out the Avram Davidson story mentioned on its cover...published in the second and final volume), and Lin Carter's Weird Tales, the second revival to use the title (Sam Moskowitz had edited four issues for Leo Margulies's Renown Publications in 1973-74 of the first revival...Carter's series saw four volumes, and some questionable accounting on everyone's part helped kill it...a two-issue revival followed in 1984, and the current WT began its much more tradtionalist (than currently) run in 1985 when George Scithers and his editorial staff left the D&D-gaming TSR Publishers, who'd hired them from founding Asimov's to edit Amazing (combined with Fantastic) after TSR bought it from Bernhard; TSR promptly sold the tv rights to the magazine and title to Steven Spielberg for his plastic timewaster...a bump of cash which no doubt helped keep the magazine going despite TSR nonchalance.

...of course, I was primed for all these as a small child, when my parents presented me with a few issues of Humpty Dumpty and Children's Digest, when they were published by the Parents Magazine folks, and not yet by Christian conservatives.

This was one of the issues of HD I had:

And, with excerpts from Hugh Lofting and Lewis Carroll (and Herge's Tintin comics serialized), I think I had this issue of CD...

While my folks would get me a few Highlights for Children and, as a Webelos, Boy's Life in the next few years, I think the digests made a stronger impression... pity my folks didn't know about Jack and Jill and Cricket...nor realized how much I enjoyed the digests...of course, I was also reading the crime-fiction and sf digests, and Short Story International, and The Atlantic Monthly and Dissent, and Omni and Scientific American, and Downbeat when I could find it, by the turn of the '80s...

For more of this round of "forgotten" books, and probably less nostalgic ramble by anyone else this week, please see George Kelley's blog, as he fills in for the vacationing Patti Abbott.

There's a ton of great stories in your FORGOTTEN BOOKS posting this week, Todd! Where to begin... I, too, shelled out the bucks for ARIEL. Who could resist that great cover? And FANTASTIC, an underrated magazine that I read faithfully for decades.

David--well, of course, SyFy the television channel mostly offers wrasslin'...between giant monsters when not between, well, giant humans who pretend to be monsters...as opposed to "syfy" the disease...these fantasy magazines are rather more stimulating, even at their worst, of higher mental function.

The current WEIRD TALES, edited by Ann VanderMeer, is trying to make a few breaks with WT tradition, not least in cover design (good) and foolishly listing themes rather than author names on the covers (didn't work for FANTASTIC and AMAZING much in the 1950s, probably won't work much now). But even the weakest issues of the original WEIRD TALES or its four revivals so far usually have some work of interest, and are at least telling of the publishing practices of the folks putting them out in their times. And, writing, as George does, of underrated magazines, Dorothy McIllwraith's editorship of the original WT (from the turn of the '40s till folding in 1954) was the era that saw the efflorescence of Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Margaret St. Clair, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and many more in what is too often disregarded in favor of Farnsworth Wright's earlier years (dominated by Seabury Quinn and featuring work by these Lovecraft and Howard and Clark Ashton Smith folks).

You know, George? I always thought the ARIEL covers could be better, particularly given some of the interior illustration (something that would be even more acutely true or REALMS OF FANTASY in the '90s and too often still), but I was gratified, years ago, to be reading a contemporary reference annual for librarians that took care to note that FANTASTIC in the 1970s was an overlooked and urgently recommended gem, despite its modest budget and relatively poor sales (though the 20K copies or so per issue that it sold then would cheer most fiction-magazine staffs today)...I was certainly gathering and reading all the back issues I could after discovering it...as Ted White and his predecessor Barry Malzberg would be quick to note as well, aside from their own terms (and Malzberg is modest about his short tenure), the best years of the magazine were under Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli) in 1959-1965, and its first few, very well-funded years, edited by Howard Browne, who lost interest as Ziff-Davis lost willingess to invest...though Bill Crider and Mike Ashley will be quick to note that, even in the depths of Paul Fairman's robotic editorship in the latter '50s and Joe Ross's no-budget attempts to put out a mostly-reprint magazine in '65-'68 (similar to Mavor's, with less colorful garishness), FANTASTIC was still fun to read...and could still offer suprises...Cele Goldsmith, as Fairman's assitant, pulled Kate Wilhelm's first story out of the slush and it ran in 1956...Joe Ross got to serialize Avram Davidson's THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR...and so on, till Harry Harrison, Malzberg and White were able in succession to improve the magazine, even given no money to work with...and FANTASTIC as a title has been revived, too, though that revival has since folded...

I loved Children's Digest which is where I first read Tintin's adventures. Lots of different kinds of things in its pages including my introduction to Ermine Bandicoot. I still remember that name all these years later.

Why, I faintly remember that name! I do wish my folks had sprung for an extended subscription, but they certainly helped make up for it later...yes, CD was at least as diverse as HIGHLIGHTS and moreso than CRICKET...

I remember Highlights from my doctor's office where it's Christianity weirded me out (the eternal pagan); I remember a story where children in the hospital and one who had been there longer told the little girl how they went to sleep with their hands held out so Jesus could take them. They helped prop up the girl's hand. She was already dead when he made his rounds, "but Jesus understood."

Hmmm...I was a pretty militant atheist from Very Early on, moreso at 9 than I have been since, and I don't remember that about HIGHLIGHTS (though it was a recurring sore point in those Don't Ask Don't Tell years of Scouting and therefore to some extent of BOY'S LIFE), but I only had a few issues of that, and perhaps they weren't the Xian issues (or are you conflating it with some of the [other?] Xian kids' magazines? I'll buy it that you aren't.)

The CHILDREN'S DIGEST at the height of its Christian right-thinking some years back was a very sad thing...I don't know if it's still being published.

I had that issue of Ariel. There are many great oldies here, as always with widely varying quality, from mag to mag and story to story. Certainly I read some early story by Sheffield, who is still a favorite hard SF writer for me, though since the cover of that issue of Fantastic doesn't look familiar. Good overview, Todd, and brought back some positive memories of the days when... Thanks.

Sheffield, who died rather young, did get far enough as to publish a collection of his Erasmus Darwin fantasies and borderline fantasies, so you might've read them there. I at this late date note, looking at the FANTASTIC and TZ covers, that TZ took a few cues early on from Ted White's cover designs (Sol Cohen always wanted his magazine covers to mention Every contributor, and White particularly treated with that as best he could)...thanks for dropping in and commenting (and causing Trouble over at Dave's blog)...